Less silver spoon in her mouth -- "more like a plastic spoon," says the daughter of an opera singer mother in Long Island, New York.

"I didn't fit in anywhere, and so music was the thing that I had to cling on to, that made me feel special and like I had this secret," added the 44-year-old mother-of-two.

The idea of one day making it big, however, was laughable to her classmates.

"I remember once in six or seventh grade, they asked: 'What do you want to do when you grow up?'" said Carey, dubbed the "songbird supreme" by the Guinness Book of Records for her remarkable vocal range.

"I said I wanted to be a singer, I wanted to be an actress. And they were all like 'haha.' Because of course at that point I still didn't really have conditioner or know how to comb through textured hair," said the musician, whose mother is Irish-American and father is of African-American and Venezuelan descent.

The wide-eyed curly-haired girl next door burst onto the music scene in 1990, with her five-octave vocal range and eponymous album that sold a cool 6 million copies.

She has since won five Grammy Awards, been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance in film "The Butler," been a judge on "American Idol," and become a mother to twins she affectionately calls "Dem babies."

Arriving in Times Square in a figure-hugging black dress recently, signing autographs for her screaming fans, or "lambily," as she calls them, Carey is as glossy and glamorous as an old-school Hollywood starlet.